Saturday, February 03, 2001
Car horns honk, are you listening?
In the lane, ice is glistening.
It's a white knuckle flight
Driving tonight,
Driving through the New York thunder snow.
In the left lane we could build a snowman
There's enough there and more's comin' down,
But we will not stop to build a snowman
Because the SUVs would knock us down.
Later on we'll retire,
With our brains still on fire,
Looking back we're afraid
Of the trek that we made
Driving through the New York thunder snow.
On the freeway we might find a snowplow
And we will follow him if he'll allow.
He'll say "Where're ya going?"
We'll wish "Home now,"
But instead we'll follow to the nearest town.
Snow and lightenin' might look thrillin'
But our traction is a illin',
It's a worrisome sight
Driving tonight
Driving throught the New York thunder snow.
The crazy things i think up to stop me from worrying about the fact that a snow plow nearly creamed us when we stopped to get gas. Good thing the gas pump was in the way and deflected him away from us.~w
p.s. The students did us proud today with their show. There were a few stumbles and snafus, but they didn't stop the students from looking like stars. I think my favorite moment was the pair who did Birds of Passage by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and pulled off a stellar rendition of it despite the fact that they were missing 2 members of their group and the young man who did perform had missed the last rehearsal because he was out sick. The audience never knew the difference.
p.s.s. A bit of weird synchronicity, two of the students we met at this school were the grandchildren of a Beruit hotel owner mentioned in the book we've been reading.
wendi's 12:35 AM ravings
Friday, February 02, 2001
Ugh, what a day. I slept for 3-1/2 hours when i got back to the hotel. Now of course it's bedtime and i'm wide awake. I'm hoping tomorrow will go smoothly as the countdown to the afternoon show approaches. Let's see what Rob Brezney has to say about the week: "it's an excellent time to work on becoming a better communicator." Okay, doesn't tell me much to change my life, but i could use that reminder given that communication skills today were at an all time low for me. Of course there's always Astrocenter or Da Juana Byrd's daily horoscopes, but i always find Brezney's take on astrology a lot more fun.
I cleaned up my hard drive this evening hoping that it would help me clean out my own brain of unnecessary debris. It's amazing how being a pack rat translates to computer files. I found things i had completely forgotten about. Programs i downloaded and never used, pictures i haven't looked at since they were emailed to me, etc. No wonder i was running out of hard drive space. My friend Matthew used to say (or maybe it was Sherlock Holmes that said it, and he co-opted it, i'm not sure) that his brain was like an attic and every-so-often it needed a good cleaning to avoid a situation where you lose something important out a window while trying to squeeze a new pile of stuff up there. Well, my brain is in need of spring cleaning. The only problem is that now that i've cleaned up some of my hard drive i've uncovered more quirky problems and i'm a little leary of uncovering any more quirks in my personality right now. Maybe i'd better put off the brain cleaning until the weekend.~w
wendi's 2:06 AM ravings
Thursday, February 01, 2001
I spent too much time updating the Poetry Alive! website tonight and then i had to order food to be sent home to my cat. So, it's late and this will be short (i know lame excuse, but true).
I discovered that Temptation Island is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Your gut tells you it will be gruesome, but for some reason you're transfixed and keep watching. I meant to get the tv turned to West Wing, but it never made it that far.
The kids were crazy today. Some of them were totally on the ball and excited to be working on the poems, but others were a handful. We lost a 3rd grader in the middle of our session and when we found a teacher and told her, the response was "oh, you didn't lose much." Yikes! It left me feeling rather cold. He returned after awhile on his own, but couldn't be cajoled out of sulking in the corner. The other members of his group just went on working without him as if they never expected him to participate. On the other hand the fifth and sixth graders are working like gangbusters and are sure to put on a stellar show friday afternoon. I dubbed one third grader "frogger" because every time i saw him he was hopping in circles on the floor (even though he's playing a goat in his poem). Kids. There's a first grader named Max who has made a point of finding ciro and i each day at lunch just to say "i found you." His classmates at my table today informed me that "he's weird." I just ate my chicken wings and peanut butter and jelly sandwich and chuckled to myself.
If you haven't had a good ol' fashioned PB&J sandwich in a while you're missing out.~w
wendi's 1:25 AM ravings
Wednesday, January 31, 2001
Ah, today went much better. I seemed to communicate with everyone easier. It was a 12 hour day for us though. We did have a lunch break and then a funky mid-day break, but not enough to really relax or do anything. We flew through 4 students workshops and then an afternoon session with the teachers after school. These kids are very sharp, they really keep you on your toes. I feel drained of creative insight after helping them dig through their poems getting them ready to perform.
I had Thai food for dinner for the first time in ages and it was very tasty. Um, okay...
Okay, dig out the notebook and find something interesting...ah, here we go.
I had some notes to myself a few days back about relationships. My friend Deb had sent me an email with some good points that got me thinking. --Okay, i just got distracted, i went looking to see if her page was up yet, and found this article about a book i wasn't aware she'd written. It's amazing what you find out about your friends on the web.-- Anyway, she sent me this line about learning "to let go of the other side of the script" when it comes to relationships. As a creative writer there is a need to get inside the head of every character i write about, and it is all my own imagining that brings these characters to life. But, in reality we can never know exactly what someone else is thinking. Yet there is a pull to try to write the other person's lines for them. Having fed on romantic fairy tales, i find myself often trying to write the "happily ever after" for a relationship even before it has begun. The result? Disappointment, frustration, misunderstandings and ultimately after many months i end up with a friend at best. As the days whittle down toward that unfortunate day of red paper hearts and overpriced boxes of chocolate i keep reminding myself that you can't just neatly wrap up and give yourself the perfectly packaged hollywood romance. The stuff that makes the pulse quicken and the face blush is luminiferous ether, not a keenly devised plot.~w
wendi's 12:46 AM ravings
Tuesday, January 30, 2001
I feel like i lost my mind. I may have just misplaced it somewhere, but i'm having a hard time remembering where i am today. Today we did 3 shows and 2 workshops and i felt like it was the first time i'd ever tried to do them. I've been doing the workshops for 4 years now and these were just standard day one residency things with 3rd and 4th graders who'd seen a workshop last year. So, you go in and review the material and then set them to work on poems, right? Well, that's if the students are listening to you, but these kids "knew it all" and so i seemed to spend a lot of time re-giving instructions rather than getting to be creative. I thought ciro was going to blow a fuse as well and when i tried to talk to him i seemed to just confuse him more. I feel like the words coming out of my mouth just don't match the thoughts that are in my head. There's some strange movie on HBO about traveling by transferring your consciousness to another body. Ah, maybe that's my pwoblem too! (Sorry, in joke. It refers to a poem Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too by James W. Hall. a very fun read...) Anyway, the movie is called Xchange, i think. Perhaps i'm suffering from consciousness jetlag. My mind is still somewhere else.
I did have a tasty dinner today at this little place called King David's near the university here in Syracuse. I'm hoping the baklava i had for dessert will help recharge my brain batteries.~w
wendi's 12:03 AM ravings
Monday, January 29, 2001
This is actually last night's post, but blogger was updating and i needed to get some sleep.
Poetry Super Highway has posted it's awards for 2000 and i want to send out a special congratulations to Bob and Margery of About Poetry for winning the favorite online resource award. Their poetry museletter is a super update of goings on around the country for a mobile poet like me and it's always great to see what's keeping good folks like Gary, Phil and Danika (some of their musletter correspondents) busy. Oh, and they were kind enough to post my first tour doodles as a special article back when i was still a fresh young road poet (you can also see the full unedited version on my website here).
We drove to Syracuse, NY today. It's frozen and snowy here and there wasn't much to do but sit down and watch the Ravens tear apart the Giants. So, there, i've done my civic duty for the weekend and participated in the mass media extravaganza. If i have to pick favorite moments i'd say, Dole's Pepsi commercial, the What are you doing? Drinking imported beer and watching the market returns Bud commercial, and the E-trade monkey crying over the demise of the Pets.com sock puppet. But i still don't drink Pepsi or Bud and (though i used Pets.com to buy cheap cat food) i don't plan to invest using E-trade. I guess i'm not a good candidate for brain washing. Oh, and for the record i'd like to say that i found Brittany Spears singing with Areosmith scary, but Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful was truly inspiring. My mom always said that should be the national anthem anyway. Yikes, i just realized that i know too many of the songs at this site! But hey, some of the best ones i learned (okay yeah i admit it, i went to scout camp as a kid) aren't here. Don't worry, somewhere in a box marked "stuff" i have my little songbook that i made with all the "good" songs in it that you won't find there (i think some of them were actually written by our counselors). Oh, but i've gone off on a tangent.
I meant to mention that i've begun to see a link between the some of the problems in Jerusalem (still reading that book by Friedman out loud while ciro drives) and those bubbling under the surface in our own country. It all boils down to how you dot the i's and cross the t's of your particular religion. Israel is a Jewish state, but that doesn't mean that everyone in the country follows orthodox jewish law. Friedman defines at least 4 degrees of variation in the beliefs of the population as to how to define a "Jewish state." Multiply that by several times in America where we are "one nation under god" but there is no "state" religion which guides the law (ah, hence separation of church and state). Here, not only is there disagreement among the protestants (who, with the exception of Kennedy-a catholic, have been our presidents) as to what our "moral values" as a country should be, but also among the mulitude of other faiths that have found sanctuary to worship in this "free" country. I'm beginning to believe that those right-wing "conservatives" are not so "conservative" as they are "fundamentalist" with a religious agenda for the laws governing this country. I don't have a problem with them observing their faith in their own homes and communities, but i do have a problem when their faith begins to define my rights. I'm still working on this idea, and there is much more to be pondered before i step into this quagmire.
For now, i will leave you with that and sign off in order to be properly awake and entertaining to elementary students in the morning.~w
wendi's 8:22 AM ravings
Sunday, January 28, 2001
Oh, correction...the Bloggies aren't Blogger's doing - it's Nikolai's. Thanks Jish. By the way you can vote for Jish AND webloggers there.
wendi's 11:42 AM ravings
Well, I'm still in Jersey. I think my next door neighbors are having sex based on the repeated banging against the wall. I hope they go to sleep soon (no, it's not ciro, he's across the way probably asleep by now). I should be asleep of course, but i'm all screwed up from staying up to get here last night and sleeping in till noonish today (or was it twoish). Anyway, it's not that i have anything against my unknown neighbors enjoying themselves, i just don't want to hear it. Call me jealous, but it's been a few of years since i've had anyone to smooch and i'm turning the tv on to try to hide the noise. Besides, they probably got the hotel room to get some privacy and would be unhappy to know that their broadcasting to their neighbors.
I did get out of the room for a bit today though. A friend of ciro's came up to visit today and we all went to see Snatch. There's blood, there's a dog, there's jewel theives, there's thick cockney and gipsy dialects but if you like that sort of thing it great fast-paced hysterical fun.
Other than that, i just did laundry and browsed through weblogs to see what else is out there. Ephemeral Pulp is my current favorite written by someone i have never met. I found that one through Launch which is devoted to reviewing new weblogs. Being relatively new to the whole weblog thing i had no idea that this has become such a huge deal. Blogger is currently accepting votes for their 1st annual bloggies and has posted their finalists with links for the general public to vote on until the end of the month. It's strange though, i keep finding Seattle women as i browse through them like Carlaland and Jessamyn (who is the mind behind librarian.net and another favorite unknown of mine). It's strange peeping in on what other's have to say about their lives, but i guess that's what the whole public journal thing is about. Mostly i like keeping updated on what friends of mine are up to around the country. Speaking of friends, Kim is currently accepting poetry submissions for the winter issue of Lid, but beware, certain restrictions apply.
But with all that browsing, i've discovered that this whole web thing can be very addictive. Just when you get bored with a newsgroup there's listserves or online clubs or chat rooms or weblogs. What do they all have in common? Instant community with no strings attached. I just keep reminding myself that i need to talk to people in person more often before i forget how to do that.~w
wendi's 2:34 AM ravings
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